Endangered Opinion and the Life of the Soul

Driving home from the coffeehouse where we’d gone to hear our young friend perform, having left early during the set that followed our friend’s first set, Orin blazed forth about singers who don’t speak their words. I was uncomfortable with the coloration his anger gave to our reason for leaving; I had thought we’d left because of next morning’s early duties at the Café. His vociferously expressed opinion (pretty much Orin’s preferred mode for the expressing of opinion is vociferous) suggested to me we’d left because he could not tolerate the music. I felt he was being unfair, that anger was the wrong response, as these were young kids just making their first attempts at performing. They need our feedback in order to develop, I rebuked him, not our harsh criticism.

In part, we were enacting the same old Mother vs. Father argument, the mother’s archetypal role to unconditionally care for vulnerable others, the father’s to make distinctions and demand excellence. Something like that. Letting go of my hurt feelings for a moment, however, another way of looking at the disagreement began to enter my awareness. What he was pointing out, albeit with too much energy, was something I myself had noticed many times with students and with my own children: the habit of using language as if the words did not matter. (Think of it: with the advent of cell phone cameras, no one will ever have to struggle for words to describe anything, again, ever!!)

After some thought, though I maintain I am right in feeling that it is the job of elders to encourage expression, not to squash it, I concluded that Orin’s point was well-taken, for words do matter. As we have so often found in the course of our 32 year marriage, both truths can co-exist and become more than each alone, supremely in the right and squared off against the other, could be. Further, though my hearing is undoubtedly worsening, and my samples no doubt skewed by the stranded outpost of a city I live in, there does seem to be a trend afoot to kill words, and with them the strong and definite, if connotative and metaphoric, meanings words imply. TV and other mass media have of course been instrumental in this trend, driven by their imperative, because they are aimed at the “masses,” to dumb down messages and remove the need for thinking on the part of the audience.

Because for the past decade and more I have dedicated myself, like a medieval hermit, to a practice of solitude in which my own voice, my own words and ideas are given their due, this war against words is hard on me, who am generally not able to express myself in the common, dumbed down, flattened idiom (not because I’m so smart, mind you, but because I am out of practice!) Moreover, such a war on words makes it difficult for anyone whose soul needs to know that other souls exist; others who, like themselves, are engaged in the struggle to preserve meaning and need to hear, once in awhile, the sound of another individual’s genuine thought or imagining. Further, using my own personal experience and my experience teaching writing and public speaking to college students for 26 years, upon which to base my opinion, not only are words mattering less, but the having of genuine opinions is a behavior decidedly on the decline.

One of my early awakenings in the late 1980’s resulted from a weekend spent with author Anne Wilson Schaef at Kirkridge retreat center in the Poconos of PA. She had recently published her insightful book When Society Becomes an Addict, which had been helping me make some connections between my newly discovered childhood wounds and the society at large. Many of her words that weekend went right to my core, where there was so much unacknowledged pain that by the end of the weekend, in the final gathering of the large group, the dam burst in a spasm of sobbing and some passionate words I no longer remember. In the way I understood it at the time, she had pointed me inward, to the “Christ” within, to the separate world of my interior which had been completely sealed off from my consciousness for many years.

To this day I remember Anne Schaef telling the story of a young man – perhaps her son – who had gone on a date with a woman who turned out to be excessively passive. The quite remarkable young man’s words to the date were, “You have to have an opinion.” Imagine anyone today holding this as a qualification for a second date!!

In this story is the suggestion that some forms of shyness, reticence, or passivity are inauthentic, they are ways of feeding the disease of “addiction,” or of denying the reality of the vivid interior that every one of us possesses.

In an essay by John Taylor Gatto I am having my students read for an upper level college writing course, called Against School, Gatto argues that our system of compulsory public school education is purposefully designed to render children into passive “servants,” suitable only for employment in mass corporate jobs and as mass consumers. In the rousing conclusion of this prophetic piece, he remarks that “After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt.”

Many of my students at a public university in upstate New York (as well as I myself!) are examples of the success of this mass passifying project, in place now for perhaps as much as a century. While most of my students offered no comments on the amazing reading I had given them, one young man sitting in front gave me a clue to where the rest might be at. A bit older than the others, himself a father I gathered, he was clearly uncomfortable with Gatto’s radical critique. He chose to pick on one of Gatto’s historical examples of an individual – Admiral David Farragut - who performed successfully in war as a teenager without having undergone what we know as “schooling.” Not being as informed as my student on the historical fact, I conceded the point. But privately I wait to see what happens to this young man over the course of the semester, now that he has received notice – perhaps for the first time - that the(his) soul has its champions in this world. From the many teachers I speak with who complain about the quality of their students, I know that my experience with a passified student body is not unique. But the teachers don’t get that they are equally ill- prepared to accept the news they too have a genius within that they, and they alone, are responsible for bringing forth into this world!!

For the most part, the having of an opinion is not understood as the expression of one’s “genius,” and as necessary for the bringing to life of one’s own character or personhood. Stuck within the dualistic, dichotomizing pseudo-thinking of the dogmatically rationally-based culture, people will position themselves so as to stay within the dualistic frame they know. Much of what we hear passing for opinion is actually the consequence of everyone’s having being taught, from childhood on, that their individual opinion is unimportant. Genuine opinion is substituted for with taking sides in “arguments” of no substance or consequence, at the meaning level of the Coke vs. Pepsi controversy. Others substitute for genuine opinion with being smart but unprincipled, or with being unprincipledly partisan. These last, from whom we hear so much these days, will say anything, no matter how fallacious, to maintain the dualistic “comfort zone.” Dualistic thinking, which has to think in terms of either/or, \is particularly threatened in these tumultuous times as our civilization collides to its end; thus one sees desperate, fundamentalist attempts on all sides to keep faith in enmities, rather than in reconciliation, in our society and in the world.

With each passing semester in my public speaking classes, the persuasive speech assignment presents a crisis in my student’s lives. They have not been expected to have genuine opinions and they do not have them. Recently I sat next to an intelligent and likeable young man at a bar who commenced to express his opinion on some topic. Finding his opinion objectionable, I was forced to express my opposing opinion, hoping, I suppose, for a conversation.. To my surprise he began instantly to agree with me!

Genuine opinion rests upon having a relation to one’s own true thoughts “in a marrow bone.” They are the consequence of pondering what one finds to be true, what resonates as truth within one’s own heart. These are not “easy opinions,” like Corvettes vs. Mustangs, this rock band vs. that rock band, or Democrat Vs. Republican, but opinions worked over a low fire, with some heat and pressure applied. They do not come without effort, and even pain. Thus, the having of them would be greatly enhanced if the culture taught us that having well thought out, expressible opinions is a duty one owes to the larger community.

The writing course I mentioned above, designed for juniors and senior psychology, sociology and criminal justice majors, would be unteachable if I concentrated only on writing. These people have been taught that a shallow, uninformed reaction to someone else’s fully thought out and researched ideas, is enough, as good as a real opinion based upon understanding and appreciation for what the writer has said. Because of this, I have reconceived my job as that of making a strike for consciousness simply by insisting that the students in my class read in order to understand as fully as possible what they have read. I am postponing their expression of an opinion because in any meaningful sense, they cannot have one until they understand what has been said.

I imagine (maybe “fantasize” is more accurate) to myself the joy of that student who one day “gets” what C. Wright Mills means by “mass society” vs. a “public of public opinion,” who gains an appreciation for an idea conceived and fleshed out in someone else’s head and being. I think I understand what a confirmation that can be of the freeing and consoling truth that one is not alone in the universe, that connection and community exist, and that some courageous souls have taken it upon themselves to have and defend an opinion about this world we inhabit, about its effects upon human community, and which indicates how we are injured by unconscious acceptance of status quo, consensus reality. My own radical addition to Gatto’s radical point is that because the expression of genuine opinion is essential to the common good, not just a means for those sanctioned as “genius” to fulfill themselves, it amounts to being what was once thought of as religious duty.

It is in this sense I argue we are all supposed to have such opinions, the ones that come from knowing how we feel within the private wholeness of our own soul’s integrity, vs.ones fed to us by the controlling mass “unconsciousness.” The difficult pre-requisite for having opinions is that one must be acquainted with one’s true feelings. Otherwise, one’s so-called opinions can be at best footnotes to some other “genius’s” more fully developed opinion, whether Plato’s or Marx’s or Betty Friedan’s or Michael Pollan’s or Carl Jung’s. All visionaries are deserving of our gratitude and admiration, and accepting their mentorship makes a good starting place for cultivating our personal genius. But the lesson we should take from reading opinions we admire is that we must do that for ourselves; we must wrestle our opinion out from our very flesh, and “publish it to the world,” as Thoreau put it.

One tires from the effort to maintain the clarity of one’s opinions in the current modern condition. It has always been difficult to find the truth, but today it is culturally encouraged to give up one’s responsibility as an individual to decide what is the truth. Easier to slip back into talk that keeps us within the collective universe of things the culture gives us, which do not disturb us too much, about which “opinion” is pretty effortless. I find this to be particularly true among women, who are culturally and archetypally predisposed to be relational, connective, community and family-oriented. But when this tendency is not balanced, at soul level, with healthy, archetypally “masculine” energy, what we have is a refraining from opinion. (or a falling back into the crab bucket, to borrow an image from author Richard Wright).

At a group I meet with monthly, consisting of 9 or so women friends, all of us white, middle class, middle-aged, I introduced a topic: the serenity prayer. I asked my friends to consider what in their lives is hard to accept, and what they can change, etc. At my turn, I spoke about my difficulty in accepting myself, my pronounced introverted nature, and, ultimately, my spiritual nature. All of my projects here in Utica, I said, are based in the effort to preserve my spiritual grounding, which is also the means of accepting it. I was alluding to the fact that, in my community here, I do some striking things, perhaps admirable, but they are all based in the ongoing struggle I face to accept that which I cannot change; they are rooted in surrender. All else is ego. Even our defeatism, the inability to follow through on projects of our enthusiasm, to write the novel or launch the small business, is ego-controlled, which may make it harder to address than the evil of patriarchal power. I learned years ago that ego works as hard to keep us small and unnaturally passive as to make us what we conventionally think of as “egocentric,” “egotistical,” or grandiose. (All those characteristics we women like to ascribe to men) Women take heed: false modesty is false indeed! It is time to stop disowning our own masculine energies and aggressively make peace with our human opposite, as I described in my opening story. Our souls need us to actively take up their need for transcending dualism and for true soul-level expression.

In writing this piece, I have become aware I do so to push myself toward another level of acceptance of “that which I cannot change.” I continue to seek avenues by which I may do my true work of advocacy for the soul, that source of genius and of aliveness that each ignores, suppresses, degrades, denies at his/her extreme peril. Its invisibility makes it easy prey to our determinedly and lopsidedly materialistic, rationalistic, dualistic way of life, which as we now know irrefutably, is a way of anti-life, and unsustainable. The invisibility and silence of my inner nature allows me to foolishly ignore it, as if it were the puny suffering of some ragged person beneath my notice. But, in truth, my soul’s aliveness is consequence of the interplay of dynamic energies in my nature, the archetypes of masculine and feminine, which can only be realized in surrender to them.

The life force, in an acorn is invisible, but it accomplishes its undeniable – as well as incomprehensible - work of driving the acorn toward its oakish destiny. Who are we to deny that force in us?